The Gypsy Game (20 page)

At the foot of the stairs they stopped and looked at each
other, a look that silently asked if this was really what they were going to do.

“Well, now that we’ve come this far, I guess we better go on up. Huh?” April said, making it into a question, just in case Melanie wanted to help change their minds.

But Melanie only sighed and nodded.

THE METAL STAIRS creaked with every step, and so did the long platform that led to the entrance of the attic studio. With every rusty shriek April expected to see the heavy door fly open and something terrifying leap out. An angry Andre Alvillar perhaps, shouting and waving his arms. Or maybe, if Toby had been telling the truth, the grandparents’ hit men, sinister-looking characters in long overcoats with turned-up collars. As she reached the end of the platform, she was picturing the hit men so vividly that when no one appeared, she went on staring in a kind of disbelief at the solid, rust-streaked surface of the oversized metal door. She was still standing there, frozen with apprehension, when Melanie said, “Where’s the doorbell? I don’t see a doorbell anywhere.”

April swallowed, blinked, and came back to reality. “I guess we’ll have to knock,” she said.

So they did, softly at first and then more loudly, but there was no answer.

As the minutes passed, April began to feel better. More like her normal, fairly fearless self. “Maybe he went out right after we called,” she said, trying not to sound too relieved.

“Maybe,” Melanie said. “But maybe he just didn’t hear
the knocking. You know how big it is in there. If he’s down at the other end of the studio, he might not have heard.”

April agreed. “Yeah, you’re right. Maybe we could try pounding with …” She looked around for something useful, but the metal platform was bare and empty. “Or else we could try kicking. You know, like Toby did.” She backed up a few steps, ran forward, and kicked, and the big metal door swung open with a sharp metallic shriek.

They stared at each other in dismay. “I didn’t mean to kick it open,” April whispered. “I just wanted to make a noise.”

Melanie nodded. “I know. He must have heard that if he’s home.” They waited, peering into the immense expanse of the studio, which, from the doorway, seemed much the same as when they had been there before. Melanie began to move forward, and April followed, winding their way among looming pyramids of artistically arranged trash and around other slightly less artistic-looking piles of junk still waiting to be made into works of art. Overhead a bug-eyed gargoyle face made from egg cartons and camera parts stared down at them, and at shoulder level a shiny clawlike hand reached out to point in their direction. And farther away a long curved neck with tuna-can vertebrae towered up above everything else. The blue brontosaurus.

“He must not be home,” Melanie was whispering. “Come on, let’s go.”

But now April hung back. “Okay,” she said, “in a minute. But first I want to look at the brontosaurus. I want to see if Toby could have been telling the truth about hiding in the brontosaurus. You know, when he heard …”

Melanie finished the sentence. “… what the grandparents said they would do to his father.” She nodded. “Okay. Let’s look at the brontosaurus. But hurry. And be very quiet.” They tiptoed forward then, choosing their path by keeping the arching neck and tiny head in sight, and a minute or two later there they were, standing beneath the enormous blue body and between the barrel-shaped legs.

In the front leg, Toby had said, but the legs seemed to be completely covered by a stiff blue hide of spray-painted canvas. However, as April ran her hand over the rough surface her fingernails found a loose flap, and when she scratched a little and then pulled—there it was. A perfect hiding place inside the metal framework and wrinkled hide of the left front leg.

She even tried it out to be sure it was possible, slipping easily into the large hollow space and closing the canvas flap behind her. It was very dark inside. The thick blue hide shut out all the light except for a narrow beam that came from what seemed to be a slit in the canvas. A slit through which you could peer out at—something new. Something she was sure she hadn’t seen before. Scrambling out, she pulled Melanie around the enormous legs to where they both could see. “Look,” she almost yelled, entirely forgetting to keep her voice down. “Look what’s right out there.”

The something new was a kind of living room area: two old leathery couches, a couple of chairs, and even a coffee table made from half an old oil drum. A sitting area that certainly hadn’t been there a little over a week ago when
they had wandered around the brontosaurus looking for the way out. But now there it was. A place where visitors might be invited to sit down to chat—or, if they happened to be evil grandparents or hired goons, to threaten to do terrible things to anyone who wouldn’t give in to their demands.

April and Melanie stared at each other in amazement. “He could have,” April whispered, and Melanie nodded.

“So maybe he was telling the truth after all,” she said.

They were still standing there staring back at Toby’s hiding place when there was a faint scuffling noise that came from someplace very near, and a deep voice said, “Who? Who was telling the truth after all?” And when they whirled around, he was standing right behind them.

Andre Alvillar’s long curly hair was a stringy mop around his bearded face, and his dark Gypsy eyes looked sunken and shadowed. As the two girls stared in silent shock, he repeated the question. Looking directly at Melanie and then at April, he asked, “Who could have been telling the truth?” And when they only shook their heads, he changed the question to, “Was it Toby? Was it Toby who could have been telling the truth?”

April felt her head twitch from an almost nod to an almost shake and back again, and she was just opening her mouth to say something or other, when there was a loud series of noises that seemed to be coming from the other end of the studio. The noises grew louder and went from clang to clump and then to a prolonged clatter as if someone had tripped over a pile of trash. And a moment later someone dashed around the rear end of the brontosaurus
and slid to a stop. It was Ken Kamata, looking as if he’d just finished running a long-distance race. His whole face was red and sweaty, his mouth was hanging open, and he looked absolutely awful. April had never been so glad to see anyone in her whole life.

“Where have you been?” she said angrily. “You promised to meet us at Tommy Toy’s.”

Ken glared back. “I tried,” he gasped. “I got hung up. My mom made me clean up my room. I came as fast as I could—”

“Ken,” Andre Alvillar broke in. “Now that you’re here, I’ll ask you the same question. I just overheard the girls here saying ‘someone might have been telling the truth after all,’ but they seem reluctant to explain. What I’d like to know is if they were referring to Toby. And if so, where and when he told you this truth.” He paused, and when he went on, his voice had a strange quaver. “And also, I’d be everlastingly grateful if you’d tell me if you’ve had any contact with Toby since I saw you on Thursday.”

Ken’s face closed down like a slammed door. His lips pressed tightly together as if to keep the slightest hint from escaping, and his narrowed eyes told April and Melanie that they’d better do the same.

No one spoke. Andre Alvillar looked from Ken to April to Melanie and back again. At last he nodded, leaned forward, and seemed to take a deep new breath as if he’d been holding on to the last one for a long time. “All right. All right. You’ve promised not to tell. But perhaps you haven’t promised not to tell me this. If you know, please,
please
tell me why Toby ran away.”

Still no one answered. Andre sighed. “Perhaps you’ll feel you can answer if I put it this way. Did he think he was going to have to go to live with his grandparents? Did he think I was going to sign the papers?”

Melanie was nodding. She glanced defiantly at April and Ken before she whispered, “Maybe. Maybe that too, but I think it was more because—because he had to protect someone.”

“Protect someone? Who?” Andre threw up his hands in a strange, wild gesture. “Why would he think he had to do that?”

All at once April found herself answering. She hadn’t intended to at all, but suddenly she was saying, “Because of something he heard when no one knew he was listening. Because of what he heard when you were talking to his grandparents, and he got sent away. Only he didn’t really go away.”

For a long moment Andre stared at April in what seemed to be amazement or disbelief. “What do you mean he didn’t go away? I’m sure he … I checked. Where could he have—”

“Right there,” April said triumphantly, pointing to the brontosaurus’s left leg. “See, like this.” Moving forward, she pulled back the loose flap of blue hide.

Andre was staring, open-mouthed, his dark-rimmed eyes blank and unblinking. Like a person in a trance he moved toward the leg, lifted the flap, stared inside, and then carefully replaced it. And when he turned back to face them, there was a difference in his thin hairy face. A mysterious difference. It wasn’t exactly anger or fear or joy, although it
might have been a little bit of all three. But whatever it was, it changed everything miraculously. The biggest miracle was what it did to Ken.

When Ken, who had been staring at the brontosaurus leg hiding place too, let his eyes move to Andre’s face, he suddenly began to babble, spilling out everything he knew, just as if he hadn’t been the one who’d always said they couldn’t tell anybody anything—not anything—not ever! “Yeah,” he suddenly began to jabber, “he told us about that hiding place. He said he hid there and heard everything you guys were saying.”

Andre’s glowing eyes turned to Ken. “Did he tell you what he heard?” he asked.

“Yeah, he told us. He said he heard you talking to his grandparents and these two hit men they brought along with them, and he heard them say that if you didn’t do what they said, they were going to …” He drew his finger across his throat.

Andre nodded, and for just a moment his lips, under the curly beard, seemed to curve upward in a smile. “I see,” he said. “And did he say who it was that was going to do the …?” He copied Ken’s throat-slashing motion.

Ken frowned. “Not exactly. Well, sort of. He sort of said the hit men would do it. He said the grandparents had these two killer types with them.”

“Killer types?” Andre’s lips twitched again. “Let’s see if I have this right. The two hit men who came with Toby’s grandparents were going to do me in”—he repeated the neck-slashing motion—“if I didn’t give Toby up to them?” His eyes went from Ken to April and then on to Melanie. They all nodded solemnly.

Suddenly Andre began to laugh. He laughed for what seemed an amazingly long time while April and Melanie and Ken stared at him and at one another, not knowing what to say or do. Afterward Melanie told April that she’d never known before that you could tell so much about a person by the way he laughed. April knew what she meant. It was true at least that when Andre Alvillar finally stopped laughing and asked the one question they’d promised each other not to answer, they all began to talk at once.

“He’s in the basement of this old church …,” April began, while Ken was saying, “On Arbor Street. Way up past …,” and Melanie was adding, “He’s probably still there. We saw him there yesterday.”

“An old church on Arbor Street?” Andre asked as he was pulling on his jacket. “You’re certain?”

They were still standing there nodding when Andre ducked under the brontosaurus and the sound of his running footsteps faded away in the distance.

IT HAD BEEN the evening before, at almost the same time that April and Melanie were planning their visit to Andre’s studio, that Toby started telling Garbo about being a Gypsy. And it was only a little later when he suddenly decided to knock off the tall tales and tell her the real story. Right from the beginning.

“Well, see, the real beginning …,” Toby started, and then stopped to eye Garbo suspiciously. “You won’t tell anybody? Promise me you won’t tell anybody?”

Garbo shrugged. “Who would I tell, dearie? Who do I know who has time to worry about the terrible problems of a smart, healthy kid like you?”

“Yeah, okay.” Toby took a deep breath. “See, it’s like this. My mother’s been dead since I was about five years old. Her name was Joanna Mayfield, and she met my dad when they were both students at the university. They were both studying to be artists, only my father was this poor, kind of weird, Gypsy artist on a scholarship and my mother was—well, she was one of the Mayfields.”

He checked to see if Garbo had heard of the Mayfields, but she only shook her head, so he went on. “Anyway, when they got married, the Mayfields hated it a lot. They hated my dad the most, I guess, but they even started hating
my mother, who was their own daughter, and when I was born they hated me, too. Or I guess they must have, because they never tried to see me or anything like that. But then, when I was about five years old something really terrible happened and—and—my mother died.”

Toby stopped to consider. He’d never, ever told anyone about any of this stuff before. Instead, when kids asked him about his mother, he usually said he’d never had one, like maybe he was just some kind of laboratory product or something. He checked Garbo. She was looking at her fingerless gloves again, but there was something about her face that made him think she’d been listening. Really listening. And for some weird reason Toby really wanted to go on. Wanted to so much that it was as though he just couldn’t make himself shut up.

“There was this big party, see. In the studio where we lived back then, which was on the top floor of a big apartment building. And someone who was there brought some dope. Something that you could put in a drink. And either he put it in my mom’s drink or else the drinks got mixed up. My dad doesn’t know which. Anyway, my mom went up on the roof, and then I guess she fell off. I mean, that must have been what happened. Anyway, there was a big investigation and everything. I was pretty young at the time, so I didn’t understand much about what was going on, but I did know everything was different after that.”